7 ms·

Flash Game History

171 points by jslakro 6y ago

itsjustme2 6y ago
Really great work here. I love the way the visualizations are laid out, and the subject is near and dear to me. I often think about getting back into making games/movies and/or creating a Macromedia Flash 8 clone in the browser. I loved how there were just a few simple concepts such as frames, tweens, movie clips, and an asset library that you could tie together with js-like code to make whatever you wish.
- jounus 6y ago
  Thanks! So many developers loved the animation heavy Flash workflow.
awithrow 6y ago
Newgrounds will always have a special place in my heart. I remember learning flash over the summer on a lark and porting a game a friend of mine had originally written in Q-basic. It was the first time I'd ever "shipped" something and Newgrounds was where I launched it. The game ended up on the frontpage which at the time was a huge deal. From there, my game started showing up all over the web at various flash game websites. One site offered me $50 for a non-exclusive license which for a college kid was fantastic! Paid for a nice dinner and drinks for me and my friend. Its neat seeing the game show up in the top 2000 as well. Game in question is Roadblocks for anyone interested https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/192217 https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/192217
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- jounus 6y ago
  That’s so cool!
amitt 6y ago
This is missing a pretty big chunk of the end-game(s) of Flash: social network gaming. All of the top Facebook games were using Flash. We built the engine for FarmVille, CityVille, etc. using ActionScript3. Our artists would author the animations and sprites in the Flash editor and we'd be able to drop them in seamlessly into the game. Additionally, PC/Console 2D & 3D games were using Flash to author and render their UIs for a very long time via ScaleForm. They only discontinued it in 2018. Flash gaming became much bigger than Newgrounds and had massive influence on how to build future WYSIWIG tools to empower designers and artists.
- 0xy 6y ago
  How did you find ActionScript compared to other more modern languages?
  - ragona 6y ago
    Major FB games were all AS3, which was a very standard language. If you’re familiar with C# or Java you’d be totally unsurprised. In fact, Adobe hoped it would become the new JavaScript. The history of ECMA 4 was fascinating[1]. 1: https://auth0.com/blog/the-real-story-behind-es4/ https://auth0.com/blog/the-real-story-behind-es4/
    - collective-intl 6y ago
      AS3 added classes and static typing on top of ECMAScript, but lost out to regular ES3 in browsers. In a surprising twist of history, AS3's ideas were rediscovered years later with a language called Typescript that among other things added classes and static typing... Flash development's language and tools were surprisingly ahead of their time!
      - zackbrown 6y ago
        Apt that it was originally called Future Splash.
      - jordic 6y ago
Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
Has there been much of an effort to make something to convert a Flash animation/game into HTML/JS? Certainly anything ActionScript could do, JS could do as well, right?
- chaosharmonic 6y ago
  There are a couple of emulators out there, including Ruffle[0], a Rust and wasm-based runtime for Flash content that's sponsored (in part) by the team at Newgrounds. [0] https://ruffle.rs/ https://ruffle.rs/
- simcop2387 6y ago
  Nearly everything anyway. ActionScript had access to lots of system apis and things that may not have browser level equivalents still. In particular the networking capabilities and I'd be surprised if there's not more.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
gotostatement 6y ago
this website almost made me cry. It was a magical time to learn to program games, with such a low barrier of entry. I loved it so much, it helped me through a horrible childhood. I no longer feel like I want to make games but I will never forget the way it felt to be part of that community. I'm so glad this project is here to honor it and remind me of it.
- jounus 6y ago
  Thanks!
MattRix 6y ago
It is such a shame that no modern game development tool comes close to Flash in terms of ease of use, development speed, and integration of art+animation (I say this as someone who worked as a professional Flash developer for 5 years and then spent a decade working in Unity).
- salt-licker 6y ago
  Yep. It was also an amazingly natural way to learn to code. Gen Z has a lower barrier to entry than before for creating just about every form of multimedia content except games — I’d love to see someone build a fully integrated, easy-to-learn game design platform to encourage more of them to get into programming.
  - basch 6y ago
    I'm a bit out of the Adobe Animate loop, but was a lot of functionality removed from it?
    - MattRix 6y ago
      It hasn't had functionality removed but it feels clearly like an unloved product at Adobe. The updates have mostly managed to make it feel worse instead of better. On top of that, for kids learning to make games, the idea of getting a $20/month Adobe CC subscription is a massive stretch. For it to catch on these days there would really need to be some free tier.
      - basch 6y ago
        What was the free tier before, piracy?
    - neovive 6y ago
      The core animation tools are still in place from the Flash era, but simple distribution via SWF files is no longer supported in browsers. The animation tools in Adobe Animate are still excellent and are still in the creative industry to produce cartoon series on broadcast TV.
tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
Is there any easy to use, safe flash game preservation project? I remember some project that seems to require you to download the entire 1 TB torrent and/or some sort of custom launcher, but nothing that focuses on trying to translate games into JavaScript (or WASM, or something else that lets you go to a web site and start playing right away), or just provide ZIP files that you can drop into a VM with an old browser. Edit: The project I know of is https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/ https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/ and seems the most promising so far that I've seen. It's windows-only, the sandboxing seems sketchy (seems to explicitly make changes on the host then try to revert them), and the launcher is almost 2 GB, but I suspect it's the best we have right now.
- tomjakubowski 6y ago
  You may be interested in Ruffle, which is a Flash emulator written in Rust that can be cross compiled to run in a browser on WASM. http://ruffle-rs.s3-website-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/builds/web-demo/ http://ruffle-rs.s3-website-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/builds/w...
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
    The problem with this is finding/getting the SWFs and compatibility, but newgrounds.com seems to be using this to make old games available, e.g. https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/81219 https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/81219 Unfortunately not all games are compatible yet. (Edit: actually, I could only get two games to run - the above-mentioned Fishy and Divine Intervention https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/136337; https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/136337; everything else fails)
smabie 6y ago
Remember those madness animations? And that madness flash game? I loved that shit when I was 12.
ulisesrmzroche 6y ago
Flash cartoons were also a big deal, off the top of my head: Homestar Runner, Happy Tree Friends, Family Guy, Harvey Birdman, Fosters Home for Imaginary Friends, Squidbillies, Metalocalypse, and tons more. For all the problems with Flash, we definitely lost a lot when we dropped it.
- Causality1 6y ago
  The key aspect of early flash was the vectorization of graphics. It resulted in tiny filesizes for videos that could scale to arbitrarily high resolutions yet still be downloaded over a dialup connection.
dleslie 6y ago
As a game developer it feels like _nothing_ has replaced flash; sure, there have been attempts to recreate the ease of creation, but the surrounding community was as much flash as the tech itself.
buryat 6y ago
I miss Flash
chiefofgxbxl 6y ago
> Nowadays, games like the McDonald's Videogame, where you corrupt politicians and destroy the rainforest to make fast food, would most likely be banned from the App Store, cutting it off from a large percentage of players. Brings up a good point of the old WWW: we expected to have to navigate a number of sites to source content, and it was good! I remember having to surf Ebaumsworld, Newgrounds, and a bunch of direct content-creator sites to play a whole slew of games.
ffhhj 6y ago
Probably most won't remember Fantavision for the Apple II, I loved making animations with it and then became an early adopter of Flash, programming AS1 to AS3 websites and car customization apps for General Motors. The last cool thing I did with it was 3D graphics, then moved to Unity. Interestingly the first versions of Unity game engine included support for Javascript as a way to bring Flash devs into their product.
AlchemistCamp 6y ago
I can't believe it doesn't mention Kongregate.com That's the site that really roped me into programming... and illustrating with a Wacom!
Brajeshwar 6y ago
I wasn't much into games but wrote a lot of ActionScript. Some such as the video engine for Vongo (STARZ), quite a bit for Walt Disney, and Educational tools for Pearson Publishing, and few thingies for Nokia. Let me tell you a story. So, there was a gathering of supposedly some of the best ActionScript developers in the world in the Macromedia office in San Francisco (just as they were about to be acquired by Adobe). These developers were the ones that wrote libraries the world uses, best game developers, et al. One of the talks was by Gary Grossman, the father/inventor of ActionScript. He starts off by saying in the lines of, "I'm going to go a bit technical in this." Well, we heard him talk about things after which we begin to think if he was talking about ActionScript or something else. We looked at each other, “We are all n00bs here.” ;-)
pjmlp 6y ago
10 years later WebAssembly is still trying to match this https://adobe-flash.github.io/crossbridge/ https://adobe-flash.github.io/crossbridge/ Unreal Engine 3 demo on CrossBridge https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQiUP2Hd60Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQiUP2Hd60Y While trying to play the safe card, "Everything Old is New Again: Binary Security of WebAssembly" - USENIX 2020 http://www.software-lab.org/publications/usenixSec2020-WebAssembly.pdf http://www.software-lab.org/publications/usenixSec2020-WebAs... And no other tool is yet to match the tooling capabilities of Flash.
- dwild 6y ago
  I remember at the time how everyone were simply saying that Flash was no longer needed, that sure JS wasn't as fast, but that it would quickly surpass Flash... We talk about tool capabilities, but it's also a standalone format, a single file that you include and it works. There's no way to achieve the same yet in JS. I'm sure some people tried to push standard ways, but none never became as standard as including a SWF file.
  - Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
    > a single file that you include and it works. There's no way to achieve the same yet in JS. You can include all your JS and CSS into one HTML file. It's widely considered a bad practice for sure, but you absolutely can include it all in one file. Even your images can be included in the file with base64 encoding.
apignotti 6y ago
At Leaning Technologies, we are working on preserving _all_ flash content by running the original x86 Flash plugin via WebAssembly virtualization (CheerpX). If you want to read more: https://medium.com/leaningtech/running-flash-in-webassembly-using-cheerpx-an-update-d500b6fbc44e https://medium.com/leaningtech/running-flash-in-webassembly-... https://medium.com/leaningtech/preserving-flash-content-with-webassembly-done-right-eb6838b7e36f https://medium.com/leaningtech/preserving-flash-content-with... A presentation about the architecture of the system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JUs4c99-mo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JUs4c99-mo Feel free to drop me any question: https://twitter.com/alexpignotti https://twitter.com/alexpignotti
- apignotti 6y ago
  Forgot to mention, if you want to see our virtualization tech in action: https://repl.leaningtech.com/python3.html https://repl.leaningtech.com/python3.html
- lopis 6y ago
  Amazing work! Years ago Mozilla was working on a javascript implementation to help support legacy flash content on a Flashless web, but that got quickly abandoned before it mature significantly. Glad that someone else is working on it with a more modern approach.
  - apignotti 6y ago
    You are referring to Shumway. I was working at the time on Lightspark, another FOSS implementation. All these efforts, including the recent ones, like Ruffle, are doomed due to the sheer complexity of implementing Flash from scratch. Our approach is different. We run the binary plugin safely in the browser via WebAssembly virtualization.
jounus 6y ago
Hi everyone! I wrote the article. It's great to see it shared here on HackerNews. The people buildings today's tools and technologies are exactly the people that I want to reach! So many developers still feel like Flash was the most amazing thing that ever happened to them in their creative careers. For building today’s platforms and technologies, it is important to remember what made Flash great, but it is at risk of being forgotten because Flash will no longer be supported after December 2020. I’d like to spread the message to influence and inspire the next generation of tool creators!
- Kapura 6y ago
  Hey, I loved the article! One comment is the animated header backgrounds are pretty jarring for people with sensitivity to motion when trying to read. Would there be a way that you could add a button to pause the animations? I think it would make the meat of the article much more accessible.
  - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    Or maybe make it follow the browser's prefers-reduced-motion setting?
  - jounus 6y ago
    You are right. It's only in the beginning, but it can still be annoying. Maybe it would be better without the screenshake from Canabalt.
- stOneskull 6y ago
  a wonderful webpage. thank you very much for it. fountains of kudos.
  - jounus 6y ago
    Thanks!
vr46 6y ago
Great piece of work, seems to focus completely on NewGrounds, which, as a Flash games developer from 1999-2009, I had not heard of back in the day. There were Flash games EVERYWHERE from b3ta to Orisinal. We wrote games for clients and were paid for doing so, and these often had decent marketing budgets behind them to popularize them, had competitions attached and the like. The biggest was for LBi and British Gas, Generation Green, where we threw everything including the kitchen sink at the game, Box2D, particle emitters, level editor for our game designer, everything. It was pretty amazing. In the end I was working on Facebook games for Square Enix, which was - for me - the beginning of the Free-to-play genre but monetization behind the surface for extras. What a time. Way more fun than it is now.
Wowfunhappy 6y ago
Can anyone recommend Flash games I should try out? I feel like I completely missed out on this scene.
Kapura 6y ago
I've seen some other people in the comments mentioning Roblox[0]; the creator of the McDonalds Videogame mentioned on that website is a CMU professor who recently explored some Roblox games on his twitter[1]. It definitely feels like Roblox is the platform that will inspire future generations. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roblox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roblox [1] https://twitter.com/molleindustria/status/1283755485401960450 https://twitter.com/molleindustria/status/128375548540196045...
neovive 6y ago
What an amazing, nostalgic site! Flash was definitely ahead of its time. I recall the pure excitement of the early Flash days in 1999. It was a perfect storm of a having simple to use tool with easy distribution, combined with being on the cusp of major increases in Internet usage and bandwidth. The Internet was ripe for a change and Flash offered a perfect combination of vector drawing, animation, development and distribution tools. I vividly remember my first experience with Flash: watching an artist use a Wacom tablet to draw and animate a cartoon using vector brushes, the timeline, onion-skinning and then adding sound and publishing all from his laptop. As a web developer pushing out HTML pages with single-pixel gifs and tables, this was eye-opening. I worked heavily with Flash over the next few years and it really opened my eyes to the power of animation and motion graphics on the web.

171 points by jslakro 6y ago

Really great work here. I love the way the visualizations are laid out, and the subject is near and dear to me. I often think about getting back into making games/movies and/or creating a Macromedia Flash 8 clone in the browser. I loved how there were just a few simple concepts such as frames, tweens, movie clips, and an asset library that you could tie together with js-like code to make whatever you wish.

jounus 6y ago
Thanks! So many developers loved the animation heavy Flash workflow.

awithrow 6y ago

Newgrounds will always have a special place in my heart. I remember learning flash over the summer on a lark and porting a game a friend of mine had originally written in Q-basic. It was the first time I'd ever "shipped" something and Newgrounds was where I launched it. The game ended up on the frontpage which at the time was a huge deal. From there, my game started showing up all over the web at various flash game websites. One site offered me $50 for a non-exclusive license which for a college kid was fantastic! Paid for a nice dinner and drinks for me and my friend. Its neat seeing the game show up in the top 2000 as well. Game in question is Roadblocks for anyone interested https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/192217 https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/192217

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jounus 6y ago
That’s so cool!

amitt 6y ago

This is missing a pretty big chunk of the end-game(s) of Flash: social network gaming. All of the top Facebook games were using Flash. We built the engine for FarmVille, CityVille, etc. using ActionScript3. Our artists would author the animations and sprites in the Flash editor and we'd be able to drop them in seamlessly into the game. Additionally, PC/Console 2D & 3D games were using Flash to author and render their UIs for a very long time via ScaleForm. They only discontinued it in 2018. Flash gaming became much bigger than Newgrounds and had massive influence on how to build future WYSIWIG tools to empower designers and artists.

0xy 6y ago
How did you find ActionScript compared to other more modern languages?
- ragona 6y ago
  Major FB games were all AS3, which was a very standard language. If you’re familiar with C# or Java you’d be totally unsurprised. In fact, Adobe hoped it would become the new JavaScript. The history of ECMA 4 was fascinating[1]. 1: https://auth0.com/blog/the-real-story-behind-es4/ https://auth0.com/blog/the-real-story-behind-es4/
  - collective-intl 6y ago
    AS3 added classes and static typing on top of ECMAScript, but lost out to regular ES3 in browsers. In a surprising twist of history, AS3's ideas were rediscovered years later with a language called Typescript that among other things added classes and static typing... Flash development's language and tools were surprisingly ahead of their time!
    - zackbrown 6y ago
      Apt that it was originally called Future Splash.
    - jordic 6y ago

Sohcahtoa82 6y ago

Has there been much of an effort to make something to convert a Flash animation/game into HTML/JS? Certainly anything ActionScript could do, JS could do as well, right?

chaosharmonic 6y ago
There are a couple of emulators out there, including Ruffle[0], a Rust and wasm-based runtime for Flash content that's sponsored (in part) by the team at Newgrounds. [0] https://ruffle.rs/ https://ruffle.rs/
simcop2387 6y ago
Nearly everything anyway. ActionScript had access to lots of system apis and things that may not have browser level equivalents still. In particular the networking capabilities and I'd be surprised if there's not more.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

gotostatement 6y ago

this website almost made me cry. It was a magical time to learn to program games, with such a low barrier of entry. I loved it so much, it helped me through a horrible childhood. I no longer feel like I want to make games but I will never forget the way it felt to be part of that community. I'm so glad this project is here to honor it and remind me of it.

jounus 6y ago
Thanks!

MattRix 6y ago

It is such a shame that no modern game development tool comes close to Flash in terms of ease of use, development speed, and integration of art+animation (I say this as someone who worked as a professional Flash developer for 5 years and then spent a decade working in Unity).

salt-licker 6y ago
Yep. It was also an amazingly natural way to learn to code. Gen Z has a lower barrier to entry than before for creating just about every form of multimedia content except games — I’d love to see someone build a fully integrated, easy-to-learn game design platform to encourage more of them to get into programming.
- basch 6y ago
  I'm a bit out of the Adobe Animate loop, but was a lot of functionality removed from it?
  - MattRix 6y ago
    It hasn't had functionality removed but it feels clearly like an unloved product at Adobe. The updates have mostly managed to make it feel worse instead of better. On top of that, for kids learning to make games, the idea of getting a $20/month Adobe CC subscription is a massive stretch. For it to catch on these days there would really need to be some free tier.
    - basch 6y ago
      What was the free tier before, piracy?
  - neovive 6y ago
    The core animation tools are still in place from the Flash era, but simple distribution via SWF files is no longer supported in browsers. The animation tools in Adobe Animate are still excellent and are still in the creative industry to produce cartoon series on broadcast TV.

tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago

Is there any easy to use, safe flash game preservation project? I remember some project that seems to require you to download the entire 1 TB torrent and/or some sort of custom launcher, but nothing that focuses on trying to translate games into JavaScript (or WASM, or something else that lets you go to a web site and start playing right away), or just provide ZIP files that you can drop into a VM with an old browser. Edit: The project I know of is https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/ https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/ and seems the most promising so far that I've seen. It's windows-only, the sandboxing seems sketchy (seems to explicitly make changes on the host then try to revert them), and the launcher is almost 2 GB, but I suspect it's the best we have right now.

tomjakubowski 6y ago
You may be interested in Ruffle, which is a Flash emulator written in Rust that can be cross compiled to run in a browser on WASM. http://ruffle-rs.s3-website-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/builds/web-demo/ http://ruffle-rs.s3-website-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/builds/w...
- tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
  The problem with this is finding/getting the SWFs and compatibility, but newgrounds.com seems to be using this to make old games available, e.g. https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/81219 https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/81219 Unfortunately not all games are compatible yet. (Edit: actually, I could only get two games to run - the above-mentioned Fishy and Divine Intervention https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/136337; https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/136337; everything else fails)

smabie 6y ago

Remember those madness animations? And that madness flash game? I loved that shit when I was 12.

ulisesrmzroche 6y ago

Flash cartoons were also a big deal, off the top of my head: Homestar Runner, Happy Tree Friends, Family Guy, Harvey Birdman, Fosters Home for Imaginary Friends, Squidbillies, Metalocalypse, and tons more. For all the problems with Flash, we definitely lost a lot when we dropped it.

Causality1 6y ago
The key aspect of early flash was the vectorization of graphics. It resulted in tiny filesizes for videos that could scale to arbitrarily high resolutions yet still be downloaded over a dialup connection.

dleslie 6y ago

As a game developer it feels like _nothing_ has replaced flash; sure, there have been attempts to recreate the ease of creation, but the surrounding community was as much flash as the tech itself.

buryat 6y ago

I miss Flash

chiefofgxbxl 6y ago

> Nowadays, games like the McDonald's Videogame, where you corrupt politicians and destroy the rainforest to make fast food, would most likely be banned from the App Store, cutting it off from a large percentage of players. Brings up a good point of the old WWW: we expected to have to navigate a number of sites to source content, and it was good! I remember having to surf Ebaumsworld, Newgrounds, and a bunch of direct content-creator sites to play a whole slew of games.

ffhhj 6y ago

Probably most won't remember Fantavision for the Apple II, I loved making animations with it and then became an early adopter of Flash, programming AS1 to AS3 websites and car customization apps for General Motors. The last cool thing I did with it was 3D graphics, then moved to Unity. Interestingly the first versions of Unity game engine included support for Javascript as a way to bring Flash devs into their product.

AlchemistCamp 6y ago

I can't believe it doesn't mention Kongregate.com That's the site that really roped me into programming... and illustrating with a Wacom!

Brajeshwar 6y ago

I wasn't much into games but wrote a lot of ActionScript. Some such as the video engine for Vongo (STARZ), quite a bit for Walt Disney, and Educational tools for Pearson Publishing, and few thingies for Nokia. Let me tell you a story. So, there was a gathering of supposedly some of the best ActionScript developers in the world in the Macromedia office in San Francisco (just as they were about to be acquired by Adobe). These developers were the ones that wrote libraries the world uses, best game developers, et al. One of the talks was by Gary Grossman, the father/inventor of ActionScript. He starts off by saying in the lines of, "I'm going to go a bit technical in this." Well, we heard him talk about things after which we begin to think if he was talking about ActionScript or something else. We looked at each other, “We are all n00bs here.” ;-)

pjmlp 6y ago

10 years later WebAssembly is still trying to match this https://adobe-flash.github.io/crossbridge/ https://adobe-flash.github.io/crossbridge/ Unreal Engine 3 demo on CrossBridge https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQiUP2Hd60Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQiUP2Hd60Y While trying to play the safe card, "Everything Old is New Again: Binary Security of WebAssembly" - USENIX 2020 http://www.software-lab.org/publications/usenixSec2020-WebAssembly.pdf http://www.software-lab.org/publications/usenixSec2020-WebAs... And no other tool is yet to match the tooling capabilities of Flash.

dwild 6y ago
I remember at the time how everyone were simply saying that Flash was no longer needed, that sure JS wasn't as fast, but that it would quickly surpass Flash... We talk about tool capabilities, but it's also a standalone format, a single file that you include and it works. There's no way to achieve the same yet in JS. I'm sure some people tried to push standard ways, but none never became as standard as including a SWF file.
- Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
  > a single file that you include and it works. There's no way to achieve the same yet in JS. You can include all your JS and CSS into one HTML file. It's widely considered a bad practice for sure, but you absolutely can include it all in one file. Even your images can be included in the file with base64 encoding.

apignotti 6y ago

At Leaning Technologies, we are working on preserving _all_ flash content by running the original x86 Flash plugin via WebAssembly virtualization (CheerpX). If you want to read more: https://medium.com/leaningtech/running-flash-in-webassembly-using-cheerpx-an-update-d500b6fbc44e https://medium.com/leaningtech/running-flash-in-webassembly-... https://medium.com/leaningtech/preserving-flash-content-with-webassembly-done-right-eb6838b7e36f https://medium.com/leaningtech/preserving-flash-content-with... A presentation about the architecture of the system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JUs4c99-mo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JUs4c99-mo Feel free to drop me any question: https://twitter.com/alexpignotti https://twitter.com/alexpignotti

apignotti 6y ago
Forgot to mention, if you want to see our virtualization tech in action: https://repl.leaningtech.com/python3.html https://repl.leaningtech.com/python3.html
lopis 6y ago
Amazing work! Years ago Mozilla was working on a javascript implementation to help support legacy flash content on a Flashless web, but that got quickly abandoned before it mature significantly. Glad that someone else is working on it with a more modern approach.
- apignotti 6y ago
  You are referring to Shumway. I was working at the time on Lightspark, another FOSS implementation. All these efforts, including the recent ones, like Ruffle, are doomed due to the sheer complexity of implementing Flash from scratch. Our approach is different. We run the binary plugin safely in the browser via WebAssembly virtualization.

jounus 6y ago

Hi everyone! I wrote the article. It's great to see it shared here on HackerNews. The people buildings today's tools and technologies are exactly the people that I want to reach! So many developers still feel like Flash was the most amazing thing that ever happened to them in their creative careers. For building today’s platforms and technologies, it is important to remember what made Flash great, but it is at risk of being forgotten because Flash will no longer be supported after December 2020. I’d like to spread the message to influence and inspire the next generation of tool creators!

Kapura 6y ago
Hey, I loved the article! One comment is the animated header backgrounds are pretty jarring for people with sensitivity to motion when trying to read. Would there be a way that you could add a button to pause the animations? I think it would make the meat of the article much more accessible.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  Or maybe make it follow the browser's prefers-reduced-motion setting?
- jounus 6y ago
  You are right. It's only in the beginning, but it can still be annoying. Maybe it would be better without the screenshake from Canabalt.
stOneskull 6y ago
a wonderful webpage. thank you very much for it. fountains of kudos.
- jounus 6y ago
  Thanks!

vr46 6y ago

Great piece of work, seems to focus completely on NewGrounds, which, as a Flash games developer from 1999-2009, I had not heard of back in the day. There were Flash games EVERYWHERE from b3ta to Orisinal. We wrote games for clients and were paid for doing so, and these often had decent marketing budgets behind them to popularize them, had competitions attached and the like. The biggest was for LBi and British Gas, Generation Green, where we threw everything including the kitchen sink at the game, Box2D, particle emitters, level editor for our game designer, everything. It was pretty amazing. In the end I was working on Facebook games for Square Enix, which was - for me - the beginning of the Free-to-play genre but monetization behind the surface for extras. What a time. Way more fun than it is now.

Wowfunhappy 6y ago

Can anyone recommend Flash games I should try out? I feel like I completely missed out on this scene.

Kapura 6y ago

I've seen some other people in the comments mentioning Roblox[0]; the creator of the McDonalds Videogame mentioned on that website is a CMU professor who recently explored some Roblox games on his twitter[1]. It definitely feels like Roblox is the platform that will inspire future generations. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roblox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roblox [1] https://twitter.com/molleindustria/status/1283755485401960450 https://twitter.com/molleindustria/status/128375548540196045...

neovive 6y ago

What an amazing, nostalgic site! Flash was definitely ahead of its time. I recall the pure excitement of the early Flash days in 1999. It was a perfect storm of a having simple to use tool with easy distribution, combined with being on the cusp of major increases in Internet usage and bandwidth. The Internet was ripe for a change and Flash offered a perfect combination of vector drawing, animation, development and distribution tools. I vividly remember my first experience with Flash: watching an artist use a Wacom tablet to draw and animate a cartoon using vector brushes, the timeline, onion-skinning and then adding sound and publishing all from his laptop. As a web developer pushing out HTML pages with single-pixel gifs and tables, this was eye-opening. I worked heavily with Flash over the next few years and it really opened my eyes to the power of animation and motion graphics on the web.